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1-Page Summary of To Sell Is Human

Overview

Although door-to-door salesmen have disappeared, selling is still a critical activity. Sales and marketing are merging into one role at large organizations because engineers, product designers and customer support staff all interact with customers and can therefore help generate revenue. Atlassian generated over $100 million in revenues without dedicated salespeople because they had everyone involved in the process of selling to customers.

Entrepreneurs are also in sales. They don’t have a large team and budget to hire people, so they need to sell themselves.

In addition to having sales people sell products, research shows that people spend about 40% of their work time persuading others. This is so important in the education and medical industries because teachers need to persuade students to give up other things for an education, while doctors need to convince patients that they should give up certain foods or activities for their health. Considering how much these sectors are growing in our economy, it’s clear that moving people is becoming more and more important as a part of many Americans’ jobs.

The landscape of sales and non-sales selling is changing. Most people are involved in some sort of sales or non-sales selling situation, whether it’s negotiating a raise at work or pitching an idea to friends.

Big Idea #1: Honesty and service are the new tenets of sales.

When most people think of selling, they picture a used car salesman. This is not an attractive image. In the past, salespeople could dupe customers into buying poor products because there was an information asymmetry – the seller knew more than the buyer did about what he or she was selling.

The internet has changed the way people buy and sell products. Before, sellers could control the information that buyers received about their product. Now, there’s so much information online that it’s hard to know what to trust. Therefore, sellers must be more service-oriented by helping customers understand all of their options and giving them honest advice on how to use a product in real life situations.

Conventional sales is slowly being replaced with non-sales selling practices. This change in business models means that doctors and teachers can no longer keep their patients/students happy by simply giving them facts, as they can now find those on the Internet themselves. In order to be effective, these professionals must provide service to their clients, which often includes ‘curation’ of information for them.

In today’s world, the “Always Be Closing” model of selling is obsolete. Instead, a new ABC model of moving people is needed: Attunement, Buoyancy, Clarity.

Big Idea #2: Attunement: Understand others’ perspectives to move them effectively.

Understanding other people’s perspectives is critical for our ability to communicate with them. Being too extroverted can hurt sales because the salesman doesn’t listen to what his customers want and needs. The most successful salespeople are ambiverts, who understand their clients’ needs and then sell them on their products.

Attunement is the ability to understand what others are thinking, and it should not be confused with empathy. Empathy refers to understanding another’s feelings, but attunement allows you to see things from their perspective as well. Research has shown that when trying to persuade others, cognitive perspective-taking is more important than empathizing with them. Here are some tips for attuning yourself:

You might think that a position of power is always good, but studies show otherwise. You’ll be less attuned to the other person if you feel like you have more power than him or her. Therefore, start encounters with an assumption that your power is low in order to help you understand the other person better.